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In the spring of 1799, Baranof sent orders to the toyons, or chiefs, of the tribes on the islands around Kodiak to assemble the hunters. Five hundred and fifty bidarkas, each manned by from two to three Aleut paddlers, came in answer to his call, and with two convoying ships he set sail for Sitka Sound.
Baranof and the Russians with him fired off their muskets till all powder was used. Then they shouted in the Aleut dialect for the hunters to embark. The sea was the lesser danger. By morning the brigades had joined the sloops on the offing. Thirteen more canoes had been lost in the ambush.
The ships began to line up and land field-pieces for action, when a Sitkan came out with overtures of peace. Baranof gave him the present of a gay coat, told him the fort must be surrendered, and chiefs sent to the Russians as hostages of good conduct. Thirty warriors came the next day, but the whites insisted on chiefs as hostages, and the braves retired.
The animals were becoming scarce in the seas about the western islands and Baranof was compelled to replenish his trade by the catch of the southeastern waters. In 1795 he sent one of his ships as far south as the Queen Charlotte Islands and it visited Sitka on the way. Two thousand skins were secured by the hunters while on this voyage.
In the third he himself embarked, now in a raging fever from the exposure of the winter. A year all but a month from the time he had left Asia, Baranof reached Three Saints, Kadiak, on June 27, 1791. Things were black enough when Baranof landed at Kadiak.
When the time arrived for Baranof to take his departure from the land he had made his home for so many years, sorrowfully he took his leave of the associates with whom he had so long shared the dangers and hardships of the uncivilized land.
Tired of stagnating in what was an absolutely safe but unutterably monotonous life, Baranof left the factory and invested all his savings in the fur trade to the Indians of northern Siberia and Kamchatka. For some years all went well. Baranof invested deeper, borrowing for his ventures.
Of the men who came to his aid, fifteen were wounded. The corpses of twelve hostiles lay on the beach; and as gray dawn came over the tempestuous sea, six large war canoes vanished into the morning mist, a long trail of blood over the waves showing that the hostiles were carrying off their wounded. Well might Baranof write, "I will vanquish a cruel fate; or fall under its repeated blows."
Except that the hunters are few and now dress in San Francisco clothes, they go to the hunt in the same old way as when Baranof, head of the Russian Fur Company, led his battalions out in companies of a thousand and two thousand "bidarkies" walrus-skin skiffs taut as a drumhead, with seams tallowed and an oilskin wound round each of the manholes, so that the boat could turn a somerset in the water, or be pitched off a rock into the surf, and come right side up without taking water, paddler erect.
There was a foundry for the manufacture of the great brass bells sold for chapels in New Spain. There were archbishops, priests, deacons, schools. At the hot springs twenty miles away, hospitals and baths were built. A library and gallery of famous paintings were added to the fort, though Baranof complained it would have been wiser to have physicians for his men.
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